Some books don’t just sit on your nightstand. They haunt you in the shower, follow you onto the subway, and occasionally make you seriously consider booking a one-way ticket to Bali. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love is one of those books, and if you’ve already read it, you already know what I mean.
There’s a reason the publishing world has been chasing Gilbert’s coattails for two decades. A search on Publishers Marketplace shows 36 book deals across memoir and fiction in the past two decades with pitches comparing themselves to Eat Pray Love. That’s not a trend. That’s a cultural hunger. And the numbers behind the book itself are staggering: the memoir appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list of nonfiction in the spring of 2006, and was still #2 on the list 88 weeks later, in October 2008. It remained on the list for 187 weeks total. Then the film adaptation in 2010 pushed it even further: Eat Pray Love saw 94,000 units sold in the week ending in August 2010 alone, the same number of total units sold for the entire year of 2006, when the book was first published.
What Gilbert accomplished, whether you love the book or approach it with skepticism, was something genuinely difficult: she made vulnerability feel like a superpower. She turned a personal breakdown into a kind of permission slip for millions of readers to ask the questions that women have been discouraged from fully grappling with throughout history: “Who am I? Who does my life belong to? What is my relationship to divinity? What have I come here to do? Do I have the right to change my own path?”
If those questions still hum in you, the books below are the ones I’d pull off the shelf. These aren’t lazy lookalikes. Each one earns its place here because it wrestles honestly with something Eat Pray Love touched but didn’t always finish: grief, identity, the terrifying privilege of reinvention, and the strange grace of getting lost.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
If Eat Pray Love is a woman walking toward something, Wild is a woman running away from everything. After her mother’s death and the wreckage it leaves in her personal life, Cheryl Strayed straps on a backpack she can barely lift and hikes 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone.
Where Gilbert is warm and chatty, Strayed is rawer, more unsparing. She doesn’t romanticize her lows; she parks in them until she understands them. This is a book that earns every mile. The physical suffering in Wild is inseparable from the emotional work, which is what separates it from adventure memoirs that treat hardship as backdrop. Strayed treats it as the whole point. Gilbert herself paved the way for a string of popular memoirs centered around women seeking self-fulfillment, with Strayed’s Wild in 2012 being among the most celebrated.
Read this one if Gilbert’s Italy chapters made you envious but her Bali chapters made you impatient.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Some books about grief are therapeutic. Joan Didion’s masterwork is something else entirely. Written after the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, it is one of the most precise and unsettling examinations of loss in American literature. Didion does not cry on the page. She thinks on the page, which is far more devastating.
Where Gilbert seeks transcendence, Didion seeks logic in a world that has become illogical. Both women are, at their core, writers trying to write their way through an experience that resists being written. That kinship matters. And Didion’s prose, crystalline and relentless, teaches you something about what honesty on the page actually costs.
This is the book for readers who loved Gilbert’s India section but wanted more intellectual rigor and less resolution.
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
Few books in recent memory have generated the kind of word-of-mouth ferocity that Untamed did. Glennon Doyle’s memoir about leaving her marriage and building a new life is, at its heart, a book about the performance of goodness and what happens when you stop. It is ferocious, funny, and frequently uncomfortable.
Where Eat Pray Love sometimes feels like a story about finding peace, Untamed is a story about finding fire. Doyle isn’t looking to balance worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. She’s looking to stop lying to herself, which turns out to be a more difficult and more rewarding project.
This book will make some readers furious and others feel genuinely seen. Both reactions are valid. Both suggest it’s doing its job.
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
Gretchen Rubin didn’t blow up her life. She didn’t hike a trail or book a flight to Southeast Asia. She stayed put in her New York apartment and spent a year methodically testing every theory about happiness she could find. That restraint is, paradoxically, what makes this book so compelling.
Where Gilbert is expansive and improvisational, Rubin is organized and self-aware. She tracks her progress with spreadsheets. She makes resolutions. She is deeply, sometimes hilariously conscious of the gap between who she wants to be and who she actually is.
The Happiness Project speaks to readers who felt inspired by Eat Pray Love but knew, practically speaking, that they couldn’t leave. Rubin’s The Happiness Project in 2009 was among the memoirs that Gilbert paved the way for, centered on women seeking self-fulfillment. It’s a reminder that transformation doesn’t require an airplane ticket.
A Year by the Sea by Joan Anderson
Joan Anderson was in her early fifties when she told her husband she wasn’t following him to his new job. She stayed behind in their Cape Cod cottage, alone, for a year. No dramatic inciting incident, no affair, no rock bottom. Just a slow-burning realization that she had spent decades living for everyone but herself.
A Year by the Sea has a quieter register than Eat Pray Love, which is part of its appeal. Anderson isn’t performing her awakening. She’s recording it in real time, unsure how it will end. There’s something more honest in that uncertainty than in any tidy three-act spiritual journey. This is the book for readers who appreciated Gilbert’s Italy chapters and wanted that particular kind of sensory, unhurried attention sustained for an entire book.
Bella Figura by Kamin Mohammadi
A fashion journalist moves to Florence for a year and discovers that the Italians have been quietly correct about everything. Bella figura, the Italian practice of making beauty from the ordinary, becomes Mohammadi’s guide to slowing down after a life spent sprinting.
Each chapter begins with a little list: fresh produce in season, the scent of the city, and an Italian word of the month. It is, structurally, a love letter to paying attention. Mohammadi writes about food, romance, and the particular exhaustion of striving with a warmth that doesn’t tip into saccharine.
If the Italy section of Eat Pray Love was your favorite and you’ve been looking for an entire book that lives there, this is your book.
The Places That Scare You by Pema Chödrön
Gilbert’s India section, with its ashram and its meditation cushion, introduced millions of American readers to Buddhist practice. Pema Chödrön has been doing the heavy lifting on that subject for decades, and this slim, remarkable book is where I’d send anyone who wants to go deeper.
Chödrön writes about bodhichitta, the awakened heart, and how we close ourselves off from it the moment life gets difficult. Her argument is the opposite of what self-help culture usually offers: instead of running toward comfort, she suggests we practice sitting with discomfort until it teaches us something.
This is not a memoir but it reads with the intimacy of one. It is also, quietly, one of the most radical books about being alive that I have encountered. Gilbert points toward this territory. Chödrön lives in it.
From Scratch by Tembi Locke
Tembi Locke fell in love in Florence. Her husband, Saro, was Sicilian, and their love story unfolds against the backdrop of his family’s initial rejection and, later, the ravaging arrival of cancer. From Scratch is a memoir about grief, yes, but also about food as the language of belonging. Locke cooks with Saro’s mother in Sicily, learning recipes and losing her husband at the same time.
What this book does that Eat Pray Love doesn’t is hold joy and loss in the same hand without flinching. Gilbert’s book largely moves through grief toward lightness. Locke’s book insists they are the same thing, which is harder to write and harder to read and far more true.
The memoir was adapted for Netflix and remains one of the more emotionally honest portraits of marriage and loss I’ve come across in years.
Call You When I Land by Nikki Vargas
One of the more recent entries in this tradition, Nikki Vargas’s 2023 memoir charts her post-breakup years as a travel writer building the internationally sold women’s travel magazine Unearth Women. It is more modern in sensibility than many of its predecessors, more alert to questions of privilege and the ethics of the travel industry, and more honest about the loneliness that can shadow a life built around constant movement.
Vargas makes her living as a travel writer, so she’s descriptive and a good storyteller. She travels to many fun places and shares true stories of what it’s like to be a travel creator. It’s a more modern take than some of the others on the list, and her honesty is refreshing.
This is the Eat Pray Love for the Instagram era, which is to say it knows what it’s doing and doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
It would be cheap to include a sequel or a follow-up, but Big Magic is neither. Published in 2015, it is a different kind of book entirely, a meditation on creativity and the particular courage required to pursue it. Gilbert argues that ideas are living things, that they seek willing hosts, and that the failure to act on them is its own kind of grief.
What I find remarkable about this book is how it reframes the project of Eat Pray Love without ever mentioning it. The spiritual hunger Gilbert describes in her memoir finds its most practical application here: not in meditation or travel, but in the daily practice of making things.
If Eat Pray Love taught you that your life could be different, Big Magic will push you to actually change it. These two books belong together on the same shelf.
Tracks by Robyn Davidson
In 1977, a young Australian woman named Robyn Davidson walked 1,700 miles across the Australian desert with four camels and a dog. Tracks is the book she wrote about it, and it is one of the great adventure memoirs of the twentieth century.
Davidson is not looking for love or spirituality. She is looking for something harder to name: a testing of her own limits, a confrontation with solitude, a life entirely of her own making. Her prose is exact and unsentimental in the way that extreme environments demand.
This is the book for Eat Pray Love readers who found Gilbert’s journey too guided, too comfortable, too resolved. Davidson’s is none of those things, and all the more valuable for it.
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
I’m including this one knowing it breaks the pattern. It’s a novel, not a memoir, and its narrator is a dog. But Enzo the golden retriever watches his owner navigate grief, custody battles, and the possibility of beginning again with such attentiveness that the book becomes, somehow, a masterpiece of second chances.
The spiritual dimension of Eat Pray Love is present here, but filtered through a Mongolian proverb about dogs who become men in their next life. That sounds absurd until you read it and realize you’ve cried four times in two chapters.
Some books about transformation use the self as their laboratory. This one uses love. The results are quietly devastating.
Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes
In 2013, at the peak of her professional power, Shonda Rhimes was deeply, almost pathologically uncomfortable in her own life. When her sister told her she never said yes to anything, Rhimes made a decision to say yes to everything that scared her for one full year.
What follows is funnier, sharper, and more surprising than the concept suggests. Rhimes is a television writer at the top of her craft, and she brings that economy of language and eye for character to every page. This is a book about fear dressed up as a book about success, which is both more interesting and more useful.
Rhimes’s Year of Yes in 2015 was among the generation of memoirs Gilbert helped make possible, centered on women seeking self-fulfillment on their own terms.
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert
Not everyone wants to count this as a separate recommendation, but I’m making the case. Committed is what happens after the epiphany, after the love story, after the ending that felt complete. Gilbert and her partner Felipe are detained by Homeland Security and forced to travel the world until they can legally marry in America. She uses that time to read everything ever written about marriage.
The book is part travelogue, part history, part argument. It is less beloved than its predecessor, which is understandable; it doesn’t have the same emotional propulsion. But it has something rarer: it takes its subject seriously without pretending to resolve it.
Read Eat Pray Love and then read Committed, in that order, and you’ll have a complete portrait of what it means to choose your own life and then live with that choice.
Some Kind of Magic by Sonya Moore
This one deserves more attention than it gets. Published in 2023, Sonya Moore’s memoir follows a single woman who, in her late thirties, quits her job and flies to India, then moves through Southeast Asia, then drifts toward Europe, all in search of something she can’t quite name at the start.
The book has an earnestness that some readers will find endearing and others will find slightly too much, but its specificity saves it. Moore writes about India with the awe of someone actually paying attention, not consuming it as backdrop. Some Kind of Magic is a single woman’s journey through traveling and living abroad in Asia, in addition to a few stints in Europe. Sonya quit her job in her late thirties and flew to India for reflection, healing, spirituality and enlightenment.
It is, in the best sense, a thoroughly ordinary book about an extraordinary decision, and that ordinariness is what makes it feel true.
What Makes These Books Worth Your Time
The best books in this tradition share a quality that has nothing to do with travel or spirituality or even memoir as a form. They share an unwillingness to lie about what it costs to pay attention to your own life. Gilbert was honest about that cost. She financed a year of travel on a $200,000 publisher’s advance, which her critics have never let her forget, and which she’s never pretended wasn’t the case.
That tension between privilege and genuine reckoning runs through every book on this list, in one form or another. The best of them hold both things at once: the luck of being able to ask certain questions, and the courage it still takes to ask them honestly.
What you’re looking for, if you loved Eat Pray Love, is probably not another book about Italy and India and Bali. What you’re looking for is the feeling of reading someone who is telling the truth about being alive. That feeling is available in all fifteen books above, and in very different registers and textures and levels of consolation.
Pick the one that scares you the most. That’s usually the right one.